Pema Rigdzin wrote:Well, IMO, there's no way to actually know until we accomplish total realization. It seems obvious to me that conceptual thought has serious limitations. But until that point of total realization, we can hear the teachings, see the arguments they present to support their assertions about rainbow body, and decide if they're compelling. I have done so and I found them compelling. But as I said before, YMMV. It's all good either way.

Well for example, it is said I guess widely accepted that the Rainbow Body has to be disolved to reach the Truth Body.Or attaining the Rainbow Body is not attaining Buddhahood yet!

So with these two examples, we can easily understand that there is more than the Rainbow Body.

Salomon wrote:Well for example, it is said I guess widely accepted that the Rainbow Body has to be disolved to reach the Truth Body.Or attaining the Rainbow Body is not attaining Buddhahood yet!

So with these two examples, we can easily understand that there is more than the Rainbow Body.

Not sure who or what teachings say this. This may be true within the context of some other system with its own unique definition of rainbow body/body of light, but this is not the perspective of Dzogchen or its definition of this body. The truth body is the Dharmakaya and one does not realize the rainbow body, as defined in Dzogchen, without realizing all three [or four, or five] kayas [depending on which classification scheme one is working with]. According to Dzogchen, the point when everything impure that could ever be dissolved is dissolved within clear light is exactly the point at which rainbow body comes about, and it comes about in response to the needs of sentient beings that can perceive it.

Salomon wrote:What YMMV mean?

"Your mileage may vary." Or I could say, "but you may come to a different conclusion."

Salomon wrote:Yes it's all good to me, but to you I don't know :p

Not sure what your intention is with this; maybe you're just being playful. In any case, my intention is not to be adversarial but debate in a lighthearted, friendly way, without clinging overly much to being right or getting you to agree with my perspective. So, for me, it is indeed all good. Either way, the main points are that the Dzogchen texts speak for themselves, but each person has total freedom to come to his/her own conclusions about what they consider the highest truth.

Pema Rigdzin wrote:Not sure who or what teachings say this. This may be true within the context of some other system with its own unique definition of rainbow body/body of light, but this is not the perspective of Dzogchen or its definition of this body. The truth body is the Dharmakaya and one does not realize the rainbow body, as defined in Dzogchen, without realizing all three [or four, or five] kayas [depending on which classification scheme one is working with]. According to Dzogchen, the point when everything impure that could ever be dissolved is dissolved within clear light is exactly the point at which rainbow body comes about, and it comes about in response to the needs of sentient beings that can perceive it.

Well Chogyal Namkhai Norbu has made this kind of scheme in one of his book called The Way of Light or something like this. And I heard that he is widely respected in Dzogchen in here.I wasn't really thinking about impurity but more about the choice of goind deeper into Dharmakaya or Truth Body through the Rainbow Body that is showing the intermediate state of the Rainbow Body and not as the ultimate.

Pema Rigdzin wrote:Not sure what your intention is with this; maybe you're just being playful. In any case, my intention is not to be adversarial but debate in a lighthearted, friendly way, without clinging overly much to being right or getting you to agree with my perspective. So, for me, it is indeed all good. Either way, the main points are that the Dzogchen texts speak for themselves, but each person has total freedom to come to his/her own conclusions about what they consider the highest truth.

Be clear about this, I am always having fun and so being playful whatever happen.Talking about conclusion about truth sound to me a dead end. Truth has to be discovered, not concluded. Conclusion about Truth is impossible in my experience as I have noticed that evolution and change are all the time the case.

The danger of conceptualization about Togal is that it follows Treckhod, and Treckhod establishes a view that is non-conceptual. Furthermore Trekchod is built upon having received direct introduction, and the effectiveness of all of this is highly dependent on your ability to still the mind in shamatha since if your mind is chaotic you are going to have a hard time with DI as well. In essence if you lack this non-conceptual foundation, Togal is totally useless, and so is knowledge about it, and furthermore that knowledge might be harmful because anyone can sit around in the dark and see things, but not anyone can sit around in the dark, see things, and understand it non-conceptually as being inseparable from the true nature of their mind and actually have an authentic experience of that. So it would be easy for an already deluded being to become further deluded by not understanding the teachings and the explanations of them.

wisdom wrote:The danger of conceptualization about Togal is that it follows Treckhod, and Treckhod establishes a view that is non-conceptual. Furthermore Trekchod is built upon having received direct introduction, and the effectiveness of all of this is highly dependent on your ability to still the mind in shamatha since if your mind is chaotic you are going to have a hard time with DI as well. In essence if you lack this non-conceptual foundation, Togal is totally useless, and so is knowledge about it, and furthermore that knowledge might be harmful because anyone can sit around in the dark and see things, but not anyone can sit around in the dark, see things, and understand it non-conceptually as being inseparable from the true nature of their mind and actually have an authentic experience of that. So it would be easy for an already deluded being to become further deluded by not understanding the teachings and the explanations of them.

All of which is to say that it is counterproductive to keep this discussion going.

Thread closed.

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